In June 1844, weavers in the Silesian villages of Peterswaldau and Langenbielau rose up after the merchants who bought their cloth had cut their pay again and again. The main target was the firm of Zwanziger & Söhne. Prussian troops fired into the crowd. Ten men and one woman were killed. In July 1844, Heinrich Heine published a poem about the weavers in Karl Marx’s paper Vorwärts!. In it, the weavers weave a threefold curse. In 1892, Gerhart Hauptmann published Die Weber, The Weavers, a play in five acts. In the play, the manufacturer Dreißiger cuts the piece rates by a fifth. The Berlin police banned performances. In 1894, after the play had opened at the Deutsches Theater, Kaiser Wilhelm II gave up his box at the theater in protest. Hauptmann received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1912.
Equal Pay in Court
On 15 January 1955, the Federal Labor Court held that equal pay for equal work is a principle of the Basic Law. It binds unions and employers when they bargain. A collective agreement gave a female cleaner only 90 percent of the hourly wage of a male worker. On 6 April 1955, the court declared that clause void.
Almost seventy years later, Susanne Dumas was a sales representative at a metal company in Meißen, near Dresden. Her basic salary was 3,500 euros. A male colleague had been offered the same, refused it, and was given 4,500 euros. The employer argued that he had simply negotiated better. The labor courts in Saxony agreed with the employer. On 16 February 2023, the Federal Labor Court did not. Better negotiating does not justify unequal pay. Dumas received 14,500 euros in back pay and 2,000 euros in compensation.
The Right to Ask What Colleagues Earn
Since 6 January 2018, employees in Germany have been able to ask what colleagues of the other sex earn for equal or equivalent work. The Pay Transparency Act gives this right in establishments with more than 200 employees. The employee must name a comparable job. The answer is the median pay of that group, converted to full-time. If fewer than six people of the other sex do the job, the employer does not give the figure. Few people use the right. In evaluations in 2019 and 2023, about four percent of employees said they had made a request. An EU directive on pay transparency had to be written into German law by 7 June 2026. Germany missed the deadline. In July 2026, the federal government told the Bundestag that a draft law was still being prepared.
Appropriate Pay at the Top
Section 87 of the German Stock Corporation Act tells the supervisory board how to pay the management board. Total pay must stand in einem angemessenen Verhältnis, in an appropriate relationship, to the member’s duties and performance and to the situation of the company. It must not exceed die übliche Vergütung, the usual pay, without special reasons. If the company’s situation gets so much worse that continuing the pay would be unfair to the company, the supervisory board should reduce it. The reference to performance, the limit of the usual pay and this duty to reduce pay were added by a law of 2009 on the appropriateness of management board pay.
In March 2012, the pay of Volkswagen’s chief executive Martin Winterkorn became a public issue. He had received about 17 million euros for 2011. Criticism came from business as well as from the unions. Lutz Goebel, head of the association Die Familienunternehmer, said: Fünf Millionen sind eine vernünftige Grenze. Five million is a reasonable limit. Winterkorn answered: Ich kann verstehen, dass manche sagen, das ist zu viel. I can understand that some people say this is too much. In February 2013, Volkswagen’s supervisory board decided that bonuses would be paid only in years with an operating profit of at least five billion euros.
The Mannesmann Trial
The trial was about bonuses paid during the takeover of Mannesmann, with damage originally put at 58 million euros. Josef Ackermann, head of Deutsche Bank and a member of the presidium of the Mannesmann supervisory board, was charged with breach of trust. Klaus Esser, the former chief executive of Mannesmann, was also charged. In July 2004, the court acquitted them. On 21 December 2005, the Federal Court of Justice overturned the acquittals. A bonus that only rewards past work, with no future benefit to the company, breaches the duty of those who grant it. In November 2006, the court agreed to close the case in return for payments. Ackermann paid 3.2 million euros and Esser 1.5 million euros.
Pay Appropriate to the Office
Article 33 of the Basic Law requires that the law of the public service take account of the traditional principles of the professional civil service. The Federal Constitutional Court counts the Alimentationsprinzip among them. The state must give civil servants, judges and their families an appropriate living, according to their rank and the responsibility of their office. The court checks this with figures. It compares the development of civil service pay with collectively agreed wages in the public service, with the nominal wage index and with consumer prices. On 5 May 2015, it found that the pay of judges in Saxony-Anhalt for 2008 to 2010 was unconstitutional. In a decision published in November 2025, it found that about 95 percent of the Berlin pay grades it examined, for the years 2008 to 2020, were unconstitutional. It also set a new minimum. Pay must not fall below 80 percent of median equivalized income. Berlin must pass a new law by 31 March 2027.
Paid Like a Federal Judge
Section 11 of the Members of Parliament Act sets the monthly allowance of a member of the Bundestag. It is oriented to the pay of a judge at one of the highest federal courts. As a rule, it is adjusted every year on 1 July in line with the nominal wage index of the Federal Statistical Office. Each newly elected Bundestag must confirm this procedure within three months of its first sitting.
Respect and the Minimum Wage
Olaf Scholz built his 2021 election campaign on the word Respekt, respect, and campaigned for a minimum wage of 12 euros. The Bundestag raised the minimum wage to 12 euros by law, from 1 October 2022. In June 2025, the minimum wage commission of unions and employers unanimously proposed 13.90 euros from 1 January 2026 and 14.60 euros from 1 January 2027. The cabinet adopted the increase in October 2025. The coalition agreement names a benchmark for future increases: 60 percent of the median gross wage of full-time employees.
Work Must Pay More
Until the end of 2010, German social assistance law contained a Lohnabstandsgebot, a wage gap rule. Benefits for a couple with three children had to stay below the net earnings of a comparable household with a low-paid full-time worker. The rule was then removed. The principle stayed in politics. On 9 October 2025, the governing coalition agreed to replace the citizen’s income, the Bürgergeld, with a new basic income support. The CSU leader Markus Söder said: Endlich gilt wieder: Wer arbeitet, muss mehr haben als der, der nicht arbeitet. Finally the rule applies again: whoever works must have more than whoever does not work. The Bundestag passed the reform on 5 March 2026. It takes effect in stages from 1 July 2026.
Studies did not find that people on benefits had more money than people in work. The union-funded WSI institute found in February 2025 that recipients of Bürgergeld did not have more income than minimum wage earners in any household type it examined. The ifo institute noted in 2023 that in some family situations and in areas with high rents, higher earnings can be offset by the loss of housing and child benefits.
Public Pay Tables
The pay of federal employees under the collective agreement TVöD is published in a table that anyone can read. The table valid from 1 May 2026 has pay groups from E 1 to E 15, most of them with six steps. In group E 13, the monthly pay is 4,901.11 euros in step 1 and 7,025.87 euros in step 6. The move to a higher step depends, as a rule, on the length of professional experience. An employee moves from step 1 to step 2 after one year, and from step 2 to step 3 after two more years. Step 6 follows after five years in step 5. From step 3 onward, good or poor performance can shorten or lengthen the time before the next step.